Playland (28 page)

She was just getting rid of stuff. Moving on. With Lorenzo’s
three hundred and whatever else she could lay her hands on. It was not as if it was the first time she had done it. By now she was an expert at it.

“Maury, what did you do that spooked her? You take something. Disturb something?”

“Who’s Mona?”

Oh, shit. “You answered the phone?”

“It was a guy. I said he had a wrong number. He called back a minute later. He said he had a hard-on. I told him where he could stick his fucking hard-on.”

I did not want to know what else Maury had said to the caller with the erection. Maybe it was he who had alerted Mona. Melba. Blue. “Anything else?”

“I looked around.”

“What’d you find?”

He waited for a moment before answering. “Some tapes.”

“Where?”

“In the frig.” That’s where she kept them. In the freezer compartment in empty packages of Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese crimped at the open ends. Meaning Maury Ahearne had done a thorough search.

“You take them?”

“Played a couple.” He laughed. “Of yours, too, for that matter,” he said, pointing at the tape recorder. Another laugh. “So that’s who she is.”

“You ever see her?”

“I watched her take out the garbage. You know, she went through other people’s trash cans, looking for shit.”

There was no point in getting into that. “I mean when she was a movie star.”

“No. Heard the name. That’s it. She was like Shirley Temple, right?” A leer. “A Shirley Temple who gives head.”

I let it pass. “Anything else.”

He hesitated for a moment, then took several postcard-sized photographs from a jacket pocket and handed them to me. They were copies of a single exposure, a young girl scarcely into pubescence, certainly no older than sixteen or seventeen. She was
naked, sitting on what appeared to be an ottoman that was almost lost in shadow, her arms clasped behind her, hair cut short, head in profile facing right, eyes looking down, her body still developing, her thighs held tight together, as if protecting her pubic triangle. She was shockingly, innocently beautiful, this naked child, in the manner of a Botticelli Venus or a Man Ray nude photograph, and I wondered who she was and who had taken the picture, and why Blue Tyler had kept so many copies of it.

“These were in the frig, too,” he said. “Stuffed in an empty box of rice.” He seemed quite proud of himself and his discovery. “Anyone you know?”

I shook my head.

“Kind of old-fashioned looking.”

He was right. There was something dated about the photograph, and the
fin de siècle
pose of its youthful subject. I took a copy and handed the rest back to him.

“Take another one,” Maury Ahearne said equably. “She had a lot of them. A whole boxful.” He handed me another picture, then a third. “I left her some. I guess she gets off looking at the chick’s pussy. Maybe when that guy with a hard-on calls Mona.”

He was trying to goad me, for no other reason than that he enjoyed confrontation, but I was not about to play his game. “Is that all you found?” I said.

“Sure,” he said. Even if he had found something else, I knew he would not tell me. Full disclosure was a concept foreign to Maury Ahearne. What he might know that I did not was always negotiable.

I showed the photograph of the naked young woman to Arthur French the first time I went to Nogales. He said he did not know who she was. The picture is the third of the three photographs I keep on the bulletin board in my office, but I did not pin it there until later.

Much later.

E
nter Rupert Hayes. His is a name you will read only three times in this narrative, and he is of no importance to it. He was an Australian reporter, one of those large beefy red-faced types from Sydney or Melbourne, who called everyone “mate” or “monsignor” and drank prodigiously and talked too loud, usually about the venality of Australian journalism, a venality of which he thoroughly and boisterously approved, often in song. On first or eighth or twelfth meeting he would repeat endlessly:

He lived in a brothel in Hué, as he never tired of telling you, where the girls said he was a little quick on the trigger and usually couldn’t even pull it, as he never bothered to tell you. End of psychoanalysis. I avoided him like the plague, but in January 1968, we happened to fly into Khe Sanh together and
that night we shared a bunker during an artillery barrage, a thousand rounds from dusk to dawn, between us and mortality only that hole in the ground and six thousand sandbags. The bunker belonged to Bravo Company, 3d Reconnaissance Battalion, 26th Marines, and the jarheads had told us it was the safest place on the hill, a trick to initiate newcomers, neglecting as they did to add that the Bravo bunker was bordered by an ammo dump, a flight line loading area, and the regimental CP, in other words the fucking bull’s-eye for incoming. (Don’t ask how I had washed up in Vietnam. A tricky divorce, war as material, trying to make a reputation, the usual bullshit.) In any event I was there, and that night, January 26, 1968, I thought I was going to die. As indeed did Rupert Hayes. So much so that in the morning when the noise died down and the night’s dead and wounded were being tallied, he said he was flying out on the first C-130 that touched down, and touch down is all they did, they didn’t even switch off their engines, they pushed out the cargo and the empty body bags, picked up the passengers and the loaded body bags and took off, total time on the ground maybe four minutes. Fuck this, monsignor, he said, this is your war, not mine, and I don’t intend to get dead in it. How are you going to file, I said, with that commitment to the facts (truth even then I knew to be something else altogether) that I still thought was important for a reporter (while wishing to Christ I had the nerve to get on the C-130 with him)—in other words name, rank, serial number, home town, casualties, different kinds of ordnance, how bright the light at the end of the tunnel, how much the doggie in the window. In the great tradition of Australian journalism, mate, he said. Make it live. Make it sing. Make it up.

Exit Rupert Hayes. Back to his whorehouse in Hué. Just in time for Tet. When he got dead.

I don’t think I’ve thought of him since.

Make it live. Make it sing. Make it up.

I never did forget that.

This is what I have.

Chuckie O’Hara and Arthur French. Two old men with convenient memories, one overestimating his impact on the story, the other pretending he had none at all, both eminently useful in dressing the set.

What else?

The tapes I made in Hamtramck. I suspected that Maury Ahearne had stolen Melba’s own tapes, the ones she kept in the freezer compartment of her refrigerator, maybe even had duped them, although he denied it, and was keeping them, as she had been, as bargaining chips, his grasp of the main chance as tentative as hers. It turned out I was right, not that it really mattered, because Melba Mae Toolate was scarcely the most credible analyst of the life and times of Blue Tyler.

What else?

As do most writers, I like to research more than I like to write. It is comforting to sit in cramped library microfilm rooms or in front of a computer scrolling through Nexis listings; it gives the illusion of accomplishment and nourishes the idea that you are not just busy but actually working. Finding Walter Sklar, the cameraman on
Red River Rosie
, long since thought dead, alive and well in Santa Fe Springs, with a senior handicap of fourteen at Torrey Pines, is useful, even if all he had to say was that he heard Blue Tyler died in Cleveland in 1966, and that not many people knew it but Chuckie O’Hara was a fairy. There is as well always the long shot of discovering a nugget streaked with gold; the inconsistencies in a police investigation are perhaps more apparent now than they were forty years ago, unless of course (and speculation is the aphrodisiac of compulsive research) the inconsistencies were part of a cover-up. A long-forgotten police casebook becomes available, and its forensic photographs suggest that someone might not be telling the truth.

So:

Make it live.

Make it sing.

Make it up.

I
t was Rita Lewis who, the same afternoon as her conversation with Morris Lefkowitz, rented Jacob King the gated house on St. Pierre Road in Bel Air, decorated by William Cameron Menzies, with six bedrooms, a projection room seating sixteen, eighteen rooms overall, a six-car garage with servants’ quarters above it, a swimming pool tiled in onyx, north-south tennis court, a championship croquet green with a gazebo for spectators, a three-month lease with an option for an additional three. The house was a permanent rental kept for New York and English actors and directors in town for a picture, or for upper-level Industry people in the midst of divorces or trial separations. It came with four cars, including a Cadillac convertible and a Lincoln Continental coupe, and was fully staffed with butler, cook, chauffeur, three maids, full-time gardener, and twenty-four security. Coincidentally Chuckie O’Hara had once leased it while he was remodeling his house on Kings Road in the Hills, and it was he who described it for me, referring to the photographs Cecil Beaton had taken for
Vogue
when the Oliviers were living there one season in the sun, the house having long since been torn down and replaced by a faux Regency monstrosity that stretched from property line to property line.

Renting the house for Jacob King had in fact been Lilo Kusack’s idea, his supple mind beginning to operate even while Rita was fellating him by the pool after Morris Lefkowitz’s call. Morris will think it means we’ll do business, he said, and Jake will see all the cooz and forget about business, I don’t know what Jimmy Riordan was thinking, sending Jake out here, maybe Jimmy just wanted to get him out of New York, let him work on his tan while he eases Morris out of the picture, he can’t really think we’ll do business together, Jakey’s just a shooter with a big dick.